October 12, 2016
By Sam Del Rowe, contributing writer

LiveRamp Launches IdentityLink

LiveRamp today announced the launch of IdentityLink, a tool for unifying siloed data across offline and digital channels to provide an omnichannel view of customers, with the goal of improving businesses ability to reach them—what it calls "people-based marketing."

"People-based marketing, really simply, is just reaching the people you actually want to reach, and being certain about it—not just inferring that that might be the person you're trying to reach, but being certain that’s the person you're trying to reach," says Jeff Smith, CMO at LiveRamp.

IdentityLink draws information from a variety of channels, including direct mail, social media, and CRM systems. The solution accommodates the privacy permissions of these various data inputs and allows companies to "on-board" that data into more than 400 marketing platforms. According to Smith, IdentityLink moves beyond data on-boarding by "creating a much fuller picture of the consumer before the data is on-boarded."

“Data on-boarding allows marketers to take some basic information out of their CRM system and basically map that to the digital devices that people use out in the digital wild, so that they can market to their customers, as opposed to just marketing to a cookie or a mobile device ID. It's something that has been in the market for three or four years now, made popular by the Facebooks and the Googles of the world," Smith explains.

"In the past, data on-boarding really focused on pulling data from maybe just a CRM system. [With IdentityLink], you can pull data from your transactional systems, from call center interactions, from store visits, from service interactions," he adds. "And if you think about digital touch points, exposure data, engagement data, site visits—it really is pulling all of those different types of information from various channels and allowing you to create this fuller picture of the consumer before you on-board your data in the first place."

Smith also emphasizes preserving customers' privacy. "What people forget is that it’s really important that you do all of this in a privacy-compliant and consumer-friendly manner. You want consumers to know that you are doing this in an anonymized manner." He says that all the profiles created by IdentityLink are anonymized.